The Art of Rigging, Volume 2 Released

CG Toolkit has just released their second installment in the excellent Art of Rigging series. Volume 1 of this series was a breath of fresh air as far as technical publications are concerned. Their look was sleek and stylish, but their approach was down to earth and even fun to read. They manage to painlessly demystify a good deal of problems nearly every student or technical director runs into when constructing a rig. The DVD it came with covered most of the book's major topics in easy to digest video tutorials. There were well over 9 hours of tutorials crammed full of invaluable information and practical solutions.

Now that Volume 2 is out, the focus has shifted from simply rigging to a broader technical standpoint. As many have found, a rig cannot survive on its own, it needs a 3d mesh to skin to, textures to make it look pretty, a scene to be placed in, animation to give it life, and rendering to meet that footage deadling. Volume 2 deals with pipelines, the critical organization of at studio and how one department interacts with another. They delve into the aspects of a multi-resolution pipeline, allowing animators to animate a low res proxy character and eventually translating that animation to a super high res character that most computers would have a hard time even getting maya to load without crashing.

This book takes the refined rigging process of volume 1, then takes a step back to begin to include all the other aspects of a production pipeline necessary to make that rig useful.

I'd highly recommend both these books and believe that they should be an essential resource on every technical director and 3d teacher's shelf.